The Friend Who Turned My Worst Year Into a Ballad
She sang my disasters back to me until they sounded survivable.
The night my kitchen flooded, my best friend showed up with a mop in one hand and a ukulele in the other, and I want to be clear that she used the ukulele first. The power had gone out an hour before the pipe burst, because 2019 believed in layering its insults, so I was standing ankle deep in cold water holding a candle like a Victorian widow when Ritu waded in, surveyed the damage, and struck a chord.
"The Ballad of the Kitchen Sea," she announced. "Verse one."
By then I was four months into the worst year of my life, and she was four months into writing its soundtrack. In February my husband left me by text message, eleven words, one of them misspelled. In April the company I had given nine years to made my whole department redundant over a video call where someone's dog barked through the severance details. In June my landlord informed me the building was being sold. And in August, apparently, the plumbing would like a word.
Anyone can sit with you while you cry. That is friendship's entry-level position, and I do not underrate it. But Ritu did something stranger and riskier. About a week after the divorce text, she came over with wine and her terrible little instrument and said, "I've written something. It's called 'Eleven Words, One Typo.' It's in the folk tradition."
"Ritu," I said, "my marriage just died."
"Yes," she said. "And the typo was 'seperate.' The man ended nine years and couldn't spell it. This must be recorded for history."
And then she sang it. A slow, mournful, completely ridiculous ballad about a man so committed to leaving that he left grammar too.
I remember the exact moment the laugh escaped me, because it came out shaped like a sob, and then it turned into actual laughing, the ugly kind... the kind where you have to set your wine down.
It was the first time in eight days that my body had done anything other than ache.
People talk about friends who make you laugh through pain as if the laughter were a distraction, a pleasant anesthetic. That is not what it was. Ritu's ballads did not look away from my disasters. They stared directly at them, took down every humiliating detail, and set the details to music. The barking dog made it into the redundancy song. The candle and the flooded kitchen became a sea shanty with a chorus my neighbors learned through the walls.
Nothing was softened. Everything was witnessed.
Laughter did not shrink the pain. It proved the pain had edges, and anything with edges can be picked up and carried.
Here is what a diagnosis of despair actually feels like, in case you have been spared: it feels borderless. The bad thing stops being an event and becomes weather, becomes atmosphere, becomes the water you swim in. What Ritu's songs did was fence it. A ballad has verses. Verses end. My catastrophes, sung back to me in her flat, warm voice, acquired beginnings and middles and, crucially, final choruses. She was teaching me, three chords at a time, that a story about drowning is not the same thing as drowning.
By October I had started writing again myself, badly, in a notebook with a broken spine. Small things at first. Then less small. When a poem about the empty side of the wardrobe came out of me one night like a splinter finally surfacing, I posted it on a community wall for poets at two in the morning, using a name that was not mine. Ritu found it within a day anyway. "Nice try," she texted. "Nobody else on earth rhymes 'hanger' with 'anger' out of pure spite."
Now for the part I did not see coming, the part I am still ashamed of, a little.
In November, Ritu missed a Friday.
She had never missed a Friday.
When I called, her sister answered and said Ritu was at the hospital, and I said, oh no... what happened... and her sister paused in a way that told me I had failed some exam I had not known I was sitting.
Her mother had been sick since March... Stage four.
Ritu had been driving her to treatment every Tuesday, all year, the same year she was writing me comic ballads about plumbing. Every Friday she had shown up to my grief carrying her own and had set it down outside my door like wet shoes.
"Why didn't she tell me?" I asked her sister, and I heard how the question dissolved even as I asked it... because I knew. I had been the flooded one. She had decided I could not hold any more water.
I drove to the hospital with the ukulele on the passenger seat, no plan, furious with love. I found her in the corridor outside oncology, folded into a plastic chair, and I sat down and said the truest thing I had: "You absolute hypocrite."
She laughed. Shaped like a sob. I recognized the model.
That winter the roles reversed, except I cannot sing, a fact the nurses on Ward 6 can confirm under oath. I wrote her ballads anyway. "The Ballad of the Vending Machine That Ate Two Pounds." "The Ballad of the Consultant Who Says 'Essentially' Essentially Every Sentence." I performed them in a voice like a hinge, and Ritu conducted from the plastic chair with a coffee stirrer, and once her mother, who had maybe six weeks left and knew it, asked for an encore.
Her mother died in February, one year almost to the day after the eleven-word text. At the service, Ritu stood up with the ukulele and sang a song that was not funny at all, and it turns out she had been able to write those the whole time. She just needed somewhere to stand while she learned how. I understand now that the comic ballads were never only for me. They were her rehearsals, her scales, her way of keeping the instrument warm through a year when the real song was still too heavy to lift. Healing, I have learned, is rarely a solo. It is mostly people taking turns being the one who can still hold a tune.
We still meet on Fridays. The disasters are smaller now, and honestly the songs have suffered for it; last month's was about a parking ticket and even she admitted the bridge was weak.
Some nights we do not sing at all... We light a candle, out of superstition or memory or both, because every important thing that year happened by candlelight, and we sit in the small moving glow and let the quiet be the chorus.
If you have a friend like this, a friend who can find the melody in your wreckage, I need you to do something for me. Check what she is carrying. Do it today. The funniest person at your bedside is often the one holding her breath, and she will not tell you, because she has decided you are the flooded one.
Bring a mop. Bring an instrument you cannot play.
Use the instrument first.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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